...the time away.

~ Finding a bright red manual food processor complete with a mandolin and egg separator attachment for only $15,  a whisker, too...could make meringues. Instead I made basil-artichoke-parsley-garlic- pesto and sautéed it into melted  butter and small red potatoes.
~ There is nothing more calming (besides weaving) than bobbing around a friend's heated pool on a styrofoam noodle with my sunglasses and red cross baseball cap on acting like this a normal summer day in Seattle.
~ Creating an umbrella-shaded oasis in the yard, so Ray could watch the squirrels cavort, see the birds flit and read his book, drink beer and be OUTDOORS!
~ I have 47 almost-ripe blueberries on my blueberry bush.


~ I cut up watermelon into bite-size pieces, maybe it will make my son feel happy.
~ I find a rubber cowboy and a brass Christmas bell in the bottom of my gardening satchel.
~ I finally have small birds at my thistle feeder. It is worth having sunflower seeds between my toes as that is the bait I used on the deck to attract them.
~ my 11 year old neighbor girl, Laura, brought me radishes from her garden. I have no one to carve radish roses for. I guess that went out in the 50s. I know how by watching my mother make them, four side cuts and a criss-x-cross in the middle (just like the way she stopped mosquito bites from itching by pressing on the red bump with her thumbnail) seeing the bright, thin-skin pinky red metamorphosis into a blossom. So pretty and she would keep them (the radishes, not my mosquito bites) in an icy bowl of water in the fridge.
~I guess that's all. An awful lot of reasons to want to wake up and see what is in store tomorrow!

Pika after her vacation in the mountains!

side entrance to our house
Clematis 'fascination'
Sea Holly
rain garden
Fuchsia 'rose quartet'
miniature petunias
clumping Clematis 'bijou'
japanese forest grass
lettuces

"...to be lucky to be man and woman,
not tar paper and giraffe,
not paperclip and race car...."
excerpt from Infinitive Ode~Dean Young

another Summer in Seattle

"I'm sitting here in the dirt and I don't know what to do. Like most people I'm only prepared for the life I've already lived, none of which included this sort of thing".
Jim Harrison ~ the woman lit by fireflies

Dishwater

Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother’s boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.


—Ted Kooser (1939- )

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that
the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." 

~ Bertrand Russell